The Origins of the Moonwalk

We all know Michael Jackson invented the moonwalk on-stage during a performance of Billie Jean at the Motown 25th Anniversary show. What this video presupposes is, maybe he didn’t?

What the video shows is that as early as the 1930s, performers such as Fred Astaire, Bill Bailey, Cab Calloway, and Sammy Davis Jr. were doing something like the moonwalk. Now, Jackson didn’t get the move from any of these sources, not directly anyway. As Jackson’s choreographer Jeffrey Daniel explains, he got the moves from The Electric Boogaloos street dance crew and, according to LaToya Jackson, instructed Michael Jackson.

Which is to say, the moonwalk is yet another example of multiple discovery, along with calculus, the discovery of oxygen, and the invention of the telephone. (via open culture)

Tags:dance    Jeffrey Daniel    Michael Jackson    Old Custer    video   

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You Are a Small Speck

It is nearly inconceivable how small we are in comparison to the size of the universe, but this video may make it a little less inconceivable. Do you know that the Sun is tiny compared to some other stars?

Tags:space    video   

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Ten Hours of Walking In NYC As a Woman

A woman recently took to the streets of NYC and walked around for 10 hours. She walked behind someone wearing a hidden camera that captured all of the catcalls and harassment directed toward her during that time…108 incidents in all. This is what it’s like being a woman in public:

At The Awl, John Herrman notes the parallels between a woman on the streets of NYC and a woman spending time on the internet.

But the video works in two ways: It’s also a neat portrayal of what it is like to be a woman talking about gender on the mainstream internet. This became apparent within minutes of publication, at which point the video’s comment section was flooded with furious responses.

A typical post in the YouTube comments thread:

are you fucking kidding me “verbal harassment”? most of all the guys called that woman “beautiful” or said to “have a good day”….it would be harassment if the guys called that woman a “hoe” or “bitch”…you are a fucktard.

On Tumblr, Alex Alvarez neatly dispenses with that sort of “logic”:

To anchor this more concretely, consider the behavior of the men in the video. Take a look at how they seek the woman out to wish her a good morning, despite her not having made eye contact or shown any interest in talking to them. Take a look at how they’re not wishing a good morning to any other person, particularly male people, also walking around. The woman is walking directly behind the man filming her (the camera is hidden in his backpack), and not one of the men shown in the video are seen to be greeting him and wishing him a good day. Just her.

Why is this?

It’s because they don’t care, really whether she has a good day or not. What they care about is letting her know that they have noticed her — her hair, her face, her body, her outfit. They want her to notice that they’ve noticed, and they want her to notice them, however fleetingly.

Tags:Alex Alvarez    gender    John Herrman    NYC    video   

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The CIA and Abstract Expressionism

From a 1995 article in The Independent, an account of how the CIA promoted and funded US and other Western artists during the Cold War, including abstract expressionists like Rothko and Pollock.

The decision to include culture and art in the US Cold War arsenal was taken as soon as the CIA was founded in 1947. Dismayed at the appeal communism still had for many intellectuals and artists in the West, the new agency set up a division, the Propaganda Assets Inventory, which at its peak could influence more than 800 newspapers, magazines and public information organisations. They joked that it was like a Wurlitzer jukebox: when the CIA pushed a button it could hear whatever tune it wanted playing across the world.

The next key step came in 1950, when the International Organisations Division (IOD) was set up under Tom Braden. It was this office which subsidised the animated version of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, which sponsored American jazz artists, opera recitals, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s international touring programme. Its agents were placed in the film industry, in publishing houses, even as travel writers for the celebrated Fodor guides. And, we now know, it promoted America’s anarchic avant-garde movement, Abstract Expressionism.

(via @sippey)

Tags:art    CIA    Cold War    politics   

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Ballet Dancers In Super Slow Motion

Bless me Father Sloan, for I have committed a radical act on the Internet. I have watched this slow motion video of ballet dancers four times and loved, yes, loved the display of precise power and grace contained therein.

And playing a remix of Radiohead’s Everything in Its Right Place over the video? I think they made this just for me.

Tags:ballet    video   

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Dire Straits' Walk of Life Improves Every Movie

It is the assertion of The Walk of Life Project that the Dire Straits song Walk of Life is the perfect thing to play at the end of movies. I have watched more than a dozen of these and they are all great, but I picked Lost in Translation, There Will Be Blood, and Terminator 2 to embed here.

Tags:Dire Straits    Lost in Translation    movies    music    remix    Terminator    There Will Be Blood    video   

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Every David Bowie Hairstyle From 1964 to 2014

Helen Green drew all the hairstyles worn by David Bowie from before he was a star in 1964 on up to the present day. Here’s they are in a glorious animated GIF:

Green also did a one-sheet of the B&W drawings. See also every Prince hairstyle from 1978 to 2013. (via @Coudal)

Tags:David Bowie    Helen Green    illustration    music   

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Microscopic Photo of Vinyl Record Grooves

When you look really closely at record grooves, like at 1000x magnification, you can see the waveforms of the music itself. Sooo cool.

This video shows how the stylus moves through the grooves.

As Lisa Simpson would say, “I can see the music!”

Update: Here’s a great visual explanation of how you get stereo sound out of a record. (via @pcnofelt & @marcrobichaud)

Update: This is a much better video showing the needle riding through a record’s grooves.

Tags:music    video   

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The World's Best Pancake Recipe

After discovering the recipe for Robie’s Buttermilk Flapjacks in a magazine a year or two ago, my wife has been making them for breakfast most Saturdays and they are, no foolin’, the best pancakes I’ve ever eaten. They are fluffy and moist and delicious. Here’s what you do.

Combine the dry ingredients in a bowl, whisk, set aside:

2 cups flour
2 tbsp sugar
4 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp fine salt

Combine the wet ingredients in a second bowl — add the butter last, slowly while whisking:

2 cups buttermilk
4 tbsp melted butter
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 beaten eggs

Add the wet ingredients to the dry and whisk until just combined. Fry in a pan with butter. Top with maple syrup and devour.

Don’t skimp on the ingredients here. Use real butter and real vanilla extract, but especially real maple syrup and real buttermilk. Depending on where you live/shop, actual buttermilk might be difficult to find. The term “buttermilk” formerly referred to the liquid left behind after churning butter but nowadays refers to a cultured milk product not unlike drinkable yogurt. The only real buttermilk we’ve been able to find (in VT and MA) is Kate’s Real Buttermilk; even at the NYC Greenmarket, the best you can find is cultured buttermilk made with whole milk. At least attempt to avoid most grocery store buttermilk; it’s made from skim milk with added thickeners and such, basically buttermilk without any richness, which is, like, what’s the point? Oh, and no powdered buttermilk either…it messes with the texture too much. The point is, these are buttermilk pancakes and they taste best with the best buttermilk you can get your mitts on.

Tags:food    pancakes   

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Photographic Firsts and the Earliest Born Person Ever to Be Photographed

From Petapixel, a list of photographic firsts, including the first photograph (1826), the first digital photograph (1957), the first photo of the Sun (1845), and the first photograph of a US President (1843).

John Quincy Adams, the sixth President of the United States, was the first president to have his photograph taken. The daguerreotype was shot in 1843, a good number of years after Adams left office in 1829. The first to have his picture taken in office was James Polk, the 11th President, who was photographed in 1849.

Adams was born in 1767, which got me thinking about a long-standing interest of mine: who was the earliest born person ever photographed? The Maine Historical Society believes Revolutionary War vet Conrad Heyer was the earliest born. Born in 1749, he crossed the Delaware with Washington before sitting for this portrait in 1852.

But according to the Susquehanna County Historical Society, John Adams (no apparent relation to the above Adams) was born in 1745 and was photographed at some point before he died in 1849. Other contenders with unverified ages include Revolutionary War vet Baltus Stone (born somewhere between 1744 and 1754 according to various sources) and a former slave named Caesar, photographed in 1851 at the alleged age of 114, which would mean he was born around 1737.

Still, that’s photographs of at least two people who were born in the 1740s, at least five years before the start of the French and Indian War. As children, it’s possible they could have interacted with people who lived through England’s Glorious Revolution in 1688 or even the English Civil War (1642-1651). The Great Span lives on.

Tags:history    lists    photography    Revolutionary War    The Great Span   

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Front-End Loader Acrobatics and Tractor Drifting

For the sufficiently skilled front-end loader driver, doing a front wheelie with a 20-ton machine is a piece of cake.

Got this from Modern Farmer’s selection of “Jaw-Dropping Russian Tractor Videos”; the other one I liked from the list is this guy who souped up his tractor with a car engine and then does donuts in his field.

Tags:Russia    video   

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Leadership Lessons From the Dancing Guy

This is possibly the best three-minute demonstration of anything I’ve ever seen. Derek Sivers takes a shaky video of a lone dancing guy at a music festival and turns it into a lesson about leadership.

A leader needs the guts to stand alone and look ridiculous. But what he’s doing is so simple, it’s almost instructional. This is key. You must be easy to follow!

Now comes the first follower with a crucial role: he publicly shows everyone how to follow. Notice the leader embraces him as an equal, so it’s not about the leader anymore — it’s about them, plural. Notice he’s calling to his friends to join in. It takes guts to be a first follower! You stand out and brave ridicule, yourself. Being a first follower is an under-appreciated form of leadership. The first follower transforms a lone nut into a leader. If the leader is the flint, the first follower is the spark that makes the fire.

I got this link from @ottmark, who astutely notes its similarity to Kurt Vonnegut’s three types of specialist needed for revolution.

The rarest of these specialists, he says, is an authentic genius — a person capable of having seemingly good ideas not in general circulation. “A genius working alone,” he says, “is invariably ignored as a lunatic.”

The second sort of specialist is a lot easier to find: a highly intelligent citizen in good standing in his or her community, who understands and admires the fresh ideas of the genius, and who testifies that the genius is far from mad. “A person like this working alone,” says Slazinger, “can only yearn loud for changes, but fail to say what their shapes should be.”

On Twitter, Jeff Veen shortened the three personas to “the inventor, the investor, and the evangelist”.

Tags:Derek Sivers    Jeff Veen    Kurt Vonnegut    video   

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